Transcript for the Piece Audio version of arcade - word of the day

This is the etymology moment, and I'm Charles Hodgson. Today we'll hear the story behind the word arcade.
There's a band that's quite popular these days called Arcade Fire. Supposedly there isn't much meaning to the name of the band except that one of the founders had heard a story about a fire in an arcade and it stuck with him. By this you'll understand me to mean arcade to mean a place where people go, or went, to play on arcade games. Most recently these would have been video games, but as Nintendo and Xbox filled that need I'd guess even these are closing up their doors. Before electronics invaded the arcade these places were sometimes known as pinball arcades; the first citation for this name being in 1951 in the Newport Daily News?although the word pinball itself, referring to a game using a marble and a sloping board, appeared in 1911 in a toy catalogue. But before arcades were associated with pinball or video games the machines that people played on operated by the insertion of a penny and so these halls of dubious entertainment were known as penny arcades; first mentioned in 1903 in the Indiana County Gazette. But none of that tells you why an arcade is called an arcade. The word itself came from French but appeared back in 1644 in the diary of a guy named John Evelyn. In French the word had literally meant "an arch" or "half a circle" but both in French and Italian the parent word from Latin had come to be applied to a kind of shopping street or an avenue under a series of arches. I'm only guessing but I'll assume it was the long narrow nature of the older arcades, with their various openings for shops, or arched entrances that suggested the word arcade for the kind of long narrow storefront so often the home of video arcades. This first arcade that appeared in English almost four centuries ago was not a shopping mall but an avenue of valuable sculptures and it was observed by John Evelyn and jotted down in his diary during a tour of Italy when he was 24 years old. Although it was common for young men of means to do a European tour in those days, in this case there was more to John's trip than personal enlightenment. At first blush it might seem that he was an early draft dodger. He had joined the Royalist Army at the beginning of the British Civil War and soon thereafter began his extended trip on the Continent, not returning until after the war was over. It might seem that running away from a war instead of getting killed in that war is choosing the lesser of two evils, but in John's case his choice was between running away and a different greater evil, at least as he saw it. He owned estates in England that were in the territory of the Parliamentarians, those fighting against the king. So he figured if he was openly seen as supporting the king, not only would he lose his estates, but the funds that they generated would go into the enemy's war chest. So, better to flee the country and wait out the war admiring expensive statuary.